How to improve the loading time of WordPress site,how to boost the WordPress speed,why you have to speed your website? We are going to answer all these frequently asked questions.

First of all,The importance of the site loading speed for a number of reasons, including faster site will provide a better user experience for your customers and visitors, and reducing the bounce rate, increasing the time spent on your site and improve the conversion.in addition, The fast website will be better referenced by Google, so your website will be more easily to be found.

Website Mobile Friendly:

An optimized site will be displayed more quickly on mobile devices (smartphones etc.) which often have a slower Internet connection.So,we are going to discuss a number of concrete things that you can put together quite easily to increase the speed of your WordPress site.

One of the most effective ways to improve the loading time of WordPress site is to move to more efficient hosting.For example, moving from shared entry-level hosting to virtual server hosting, or dedicated server hosting, or even specialized server hosting for WordPress sites (“managed WordPress hosting”).

Here is the type of hosting to use depending on your situation:

• Shared hosting : ideal for small businesses and blogs that start
• Hosting virtual server : ideal for larger companies and blogs that start to to have some traffic .
• Hosting on dedicated server : ideal for blogs with very important traffic

For the last two options, if you do not have the time and / or the needed technical skills to manage your server, you will have to choose a managed hosting.
A specialized dedicated server for WordPress sites, for example at WP Engine , is one of the most powerful options but also one of the most expensive.

WP Engine host optimizes the performance of WordPress speed, ensures security and performs regular backups, while monitoring your extensions and telling you if any of them have a negative impact on your WordPress site.

But How To find out if your hosting is a problem?

Here are two tools you can use:

1- Google PageSpeed ​​Insights

Google PageSpeed ​​Insights will tell you the response time of your server,In some cases, the response time can reach several seconds,This is obviously a big problem if you want your site to load in seconds, because the response time indicates how long it takes to get a response from the server, that is, before the site is subsequently loaded.So,If this response time is high, you can greatly optimize the loading time of your site by opting for more efficient hosting.

2-Pingdom Speed ​​Test Tool

The Pingdom Speed ​​Test Tool also gives you great information about the speed of your site.

Apart from the response time of the server, this will give you several very useful information to optimize the loading time of your site.

The site loading time is determined by many factors.But in general, if the loading time of your site is already less than 2 seconds, you will not gain much by changing hosting.
Note that there are other services to test the speed of your site that allows you to perform the test by choosing a machine located in any place .

One of the strengths of WordPress is the existence of many extensions(plugins) that can easily add features to your site.However, extensions are also the source of many speed problems.In addition, extensions are developed by more or less experienced developers, you must pay attention to the plugins you install.

In a general way: “less is better”. So, using no plugin would be the best solution, although probably unrealistic,So, here are two tips:

1- Remove all unnecessary Plugins to speed up WordPress

Regularly review the Plugins you use and the value they bring you.So,Delete all extensions and plugins, active or inactive, that you do not need. Check if you are not using an Plugin that is redundant with something you already have elsewhere.

Examples:

• The cache may already be managed at the server level, which makes an extension such as W3 Total Cache unnecessary .
• Backups may already be done daily by your host, which makes redundant a backup Plugin .
• If you are using a comment management system such as Disqus , the Askimet extension, which prevents spam in comments, is no longer necessary.
• Voluntarily giving up some features if you decide that speed is higher.
• Use extensions that do two or more functions instead of using multiple plugins for that.ex. Yoast WordPress SEO is an extension for SEO but also supports the creation of sitemaps.
• Remove the particularly slow extensions:Identify them using the Plugin Performance Profiler extension.
• Realize features outside of WordPress.For example, web analytic, backup, sending newsletter emails or checking dead links can be done outside of WordPress.
• Disable extensions that you only use episodically.

You may be surprised at the number of Plugins that have accumulated over time, and that you do not use or use anymore.Thus, reducing the number of Plugins means making certain decisions and making arbitration:

2- Avoid problematic extensions

Some extensions heavily slow down sites.You can not really make a list because it varies over time and extension developers work continuously to avoid such problems.Typically, an extension that performs a lot of queries at the database level slows down WordPress speed, for example, extensions indicating “similar items”.

Some significantly increase the size of the database, and others make a lot of calls to external services, which slows down your site (ex. social sharing bars).

Decrease pages to Boost WordPress speed

Often, the display of a site takes time because the size of the elements composing the site (images, scripts etc.) is important.Thus, the loading takes more time because it is necessary to transfer more data for the display.The Pingdom speed test tool , seen previously, allows you to know the size of your pages (“page size”).

In general, here is an approximate reading grid to assess the results obtained:

• Less than 500 kilobytes: it’s excellent
• Less than one megabyte: it’s good
• Between one and three megabytes bytes: it’s acceptable
• More than three megabytes: we must act!

A “big” site is often caused by heavy, non-optimized images.So, an image of more than 100 kilobytes is suspect and optimizable.

Tips for optimizing images to reduce size:

• Choose the right image formats: use the JPEG format for photos and images with a lot of color.use the PNG format

If you do not know which format to use, try saving the same image in both formats, compare the resulting sizes and keep the smaller of the two images.

• Optimize all images before loading them into WordPress:Each image must be less than 100 kilobytes.
• Use the exact size needed for your images and do not use your theme to resize them:if your theme is designed to display some images with a width of 100 pixels, be sure to create images of this size.
• Use Plugins :Optimize images on your site with EWWW Image Optimizer or WP Smush it ,Using these useful plugins allow you to optimize images on WordPress, but also all the images that you will upload later on your site.
• Use fewer images: replace them with CSS sprites when possible (for icons for example).
• Use a CDN :(“Content Delivery Network“) for your media files, including images.
• Use a cache feature for your images: ideally on the host side. Otherwise, thanks to a WordPress extension such as W3 Total Cache , WP Super Cache or Quick Cache .

Another common cause of slowness for WordPress sites is the presence of many queries or external scripts or what we call external requests.

For example have buttons indicating the number of sharing or “like” on social networks, or videos hosted outside your site,As you use features from other sites, you can not really influence the speed of display,However, you may choose to give up these features in some cases.Thus, it is again to arbitrate between the display speed and the features.

In some cases, you may decide to skip some features to promote speed,In other cases, you agree to make some concessions on the speed to privilege the functionality.

Examples of external queries:

•  Videos, for example videos hosted on YouTube
• Comment systems, such as Disqus
• Live chat system
• Social media
• buttons • Social sharing buttons
• Web analytics services, such as Google Analytics

For people who are technically more comfortable, you can also load some scripts asynchronously, so that the page loads before the script is loaded,This is a good solution for scripts not required immediately for a good display of the page, for example a live chat feature.

Regularly clean your site:As you use and operate your site, a number of useless things have accumulated,Regularly, it is recommended to carry out a cleaning,Here are some ideas for checkpoints:

• Can you delete images you do not use / more?
• Can you remove extensions that you do not use / more?
• Can you delete themes you do not use / more?
• Can you delete particularly old backups?
• Can you delete some spam comments?
• Can you store some files (multimedia, PDF, etc.) elsewhere?

There are also plugins to help you clean your site, such as WP-Optimize  or WP Clean Up that clean and optimize the database, remove spam and comments not validated, delete articles and comments erased etc.

However, be careful to make a backup before using it (ex. do not delete orphan comments that can sometimes be used for SEO).

Start by improving the loading of your most popular pages

The Pareto Principle is often applied to your site traffic too: 20% of your pages account for 80% of your traffic,So, if you optimize these few pages, you will have already made a big leap forward!

First, identify the most popular pages of your site with your usual web analytics tool (Google Analytics in most cases),Then, apply the different tips seen previously for these pages,This way, you can quickly optimize the user experience of 80% of your visitors.

As we have seen in this article, there are many things that are easy enough to put in place to improve WordPress speed to improve Performance,But it’s also a matter of compromise with the design you want to have, the features you want to offer, and so on.

Having a fast site is good, but it is not satisfactory if it has become poor from a visual and functional point of view in order to reach that goal!